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Reviews the discount rate controversy, and examines sustainability theory and optimal growth theory, tracing the rise in prominence of the former and the decline of the latter. Presents the rule‐of‐thumb interpretation of sustainability criteria, and proposes a utilitarian approach, discussing its implications for uncertainty, discounting and social welfare.

The purpose of the paper is to present an integrated approach concerning intertemporal choices and the location of economic activity under a simple endogenous growth model. The idea is that time analysis concerning the choices about present and future consumption and the choices on the allocation of scientific resources should be combined with a space analysis regarding the dissemination of economic activity through geographical locations.

Two optimal control problems are considered. These relate to a standard utility maximization set‐up, in which spatial considerations are incorporated, and to a problem of allocation of scientific/technological resources. Steady states and transitional dynamics are addressed.

It was found that the long‐run steady state does not have to be a state of unchangeable geography – consumption, production conditions and technological progress determine not only long‐term growth but also the long‐term tendency for the economy to geographically concentrate or disperse.

In its essence, the model is just a conventional Ramsey growth model, sophisticated in order to include endogenous location decisions and endogenous technology choices. Further insights can be gained by readdressing the model (e.g. by assuming a monopolistic competition environment instead of a purely competitive set‐up).

The determinants of growth are, on the one hand, the decisions about how to allocate technological resources and, on the other hand, the strength with which productive activities can agglomerate in order to generate increasing returns to scale.

Despite the growing literature aimed at explaining how cultural and artistic production feeds economic growth, the causal relationships and interplays are not investigated in depth. In the attempt of filling this gap, the purpose of this paper is to examine arts, culture, and education within the framework of the New Growth Theory.

Starting from the analysis of how culture may be at the root of a specific engine of economic growth, the paper presents a theoretical endogenous growth model driven by the combination of the investments in human and cultural capital.

The paper shows that cultural investment has a positive impact on economic growth and on the level of income provided that the economy is sufficiently “culture-intensive”, and that this effect is further magnified the more total factor productivity (TFP) is sensitive to the stock of cultural capital.

The paper figures out the possibility of a cultural poverty trap as the cause of poor growth performance of some economies in the current post-industrial scenario. Culturally poor economies tend to grow slowly because of the lack of cultural exposure, which makes TFP poor since human capita is weakly inclined to be used in innovative, flexible ways.

The paper presents a new endogenous growth model. The paper argues that the available endogenous growth models fail to take into account the full set of relevant factors that make endogenous growth possible, and that the missing entry is cultural capital.

The principal aim of this paper is to review three basic theoretical growth models, namely the Harrod-Domar model, the Solow model and the Ramsey model, and examine their implications for economic policies.

The paper utilizes a positivist research framework that emphasizes the causal relationships between the variables in each of the three models. Mathematical methods are employed to formulate and examine the three models under study. Since the paper is theoretical, it does not use any empirical data although numerical illustrations are provided whenever they are appropriate.

The Harrod-Domar model explains why countries with high rates of saving may also enjoy high rate of economic growth. Both the Solow and Ramsey models can be used to explain the medium-income trap. The paper examines the impact of Covid shocks on the macroeconomy. While the growth rate can be recovered, it may not always possible to recover the output level.

For the Harrod-Domar model, the public spending decreases the private consumption at the period 1, but there is no change in the capital stock and hence the production in subsequent periods. For the Ramsey model with AK production function, both the private consumption and the outputs will be lowered. In both the Harrod-Domar and Ramsey models with Cobb-Douglas production function, if the debt is not high and the interest rate is sufficiently low, it is better to use public debt for production rather than for consumption. If the country borrows to recover the Total Factor Productivity after the Covid pandemic, both the Harrod-Domar and Ramsey models with Cobb-Douglas production function show that the rate of growth is higher for the year just after the pandemic but is the same as before the pandemic.

The economy can recover the growth rate after a Covid shock, but the recovery process will generally take many periods.

This paper focuses on economic implications and does not aim to examine social implications of policy changes or Covid-type shock.

The paper provides a comparison of three basic growth models with respect to public spending, public debts and repayments and Covid-type shocks.

This paper seeks to explore the factors behind the slow growth of economies with abundant oil and gas resources, despite the opportunities these resources potentially represent.

The building blocks of standard economic growth models and the implication of natural resource utilisation is the methodological and analytical approach adopted. A qualitative analysis of the impact of oil and gas activities on the growth of the Nigerian economy is carried out using relevant macroeconomic indicators.

The oil and gas sector is imbued with enormous linkage potentials that can stimulate other sectors to generate endogenous growth. Emphasis on the extraction and export of oil and gas subverts technological progress, stifles the revenue earning potential of the economy and stultifies the effectiveness of factors of production, thereby retarding economic growth.

Data on technological input into oil and gas activities could not be obtained, but the changing pattern of productive capacity, especially in the downstream sub‐sector, is used as a measure of technological change.

Oil‐ and gas‐abundant economies can exploit potential comparative advantage by creating favourable conditions in value‐adding oil and gas activities. Through spill‐over effects a wide range of economic activities evolves, with concomitant market expansions. Positive externalities for learning‐by‐doing arising from this process can lead to endogenous technological progress to drive sustainable economic growth.

The findings show that rather than reliance on foreign exchange revenues from oil and gas, creating the appropriate conditions for the effective domestic utilisation of oil and gas resources to bolster inter‐sectoral linkages is a more virile strategy for oil‐and‐gas driven economic growth.

The purpose of this paper is to test whether the policies of China’s financial restraint have an inhibitory effect on the consumption of residents.

This study used the principal component analysis for constructing a financial restraint index and also used empirical methodology.

The authors found that financial restraint policies create rent opportunities for banking sector and production sector, which further creates the rent opportunities for the household sector. Such transfer of rent and redistribution will have an inhibitory effect on residents’ consumption. The financial restraint policies directly and indirectly inhibit the growth of residents’ income; and in theory, the purpose of financial restraint policy is to promote economic growth, thus promoting residents’ consumption. Thus, the financial restraint policies impacting the residents’ consumption are non-linear and test the threshold effect of financial restraints on the residents’ consumption of China.

This paper’s theoretical contribution includes: increasing the connotation of financial restraint in the policies of stock market and foreign exchange controls, and further developing the financial restraint theory; and exploring the inhibitory effect on the consumption of residents from the perspective of financial restraints to enrich the connotation of the consumption theory.

The findings in this study can help the financial authorities to gradually relax the financial restraint policies to encourage residents’ consumption.

With heterogeneous findings dominating the growth and natural resources relations, there is a need to explain the variances in Africa's growth process as induced by robust measures of factor endowments. This study used a comprehensive set of data from the updated database of the World Bank to capture the heterogeneous dimensions of natural resource endowments on growth with a particular focus on establishing complementary evidence on the resource curse hypothesis in energy and environmental economics literature in Africa. These comprehensive data on oil rent, coal rent and forest rent could provide new and insightful evidence on obscure relations on the subject matter.

This paper considers the panel vector error correction model (PVECM) procedure to explain changes in economic growth outcomes as induced by oil rent, coal rent and forest rent. The consideration of the PVECM was premised on the panel unit root process that returns series that were cointegrated at the first-order differentials.

The paper found positive relations between oil rent, coal rent and economic development in Africa. Forest rent, on the other hand, is inversely related to economic growth in Africa. Trade and human capital are positively related to economic growth in Africa, while population growth is negatively associated with economic growth in Africa.

Short-run policies should be tailored towards the stability of fiscal expenditure such that the objective of fiscal policy, which is to maintain the condition of full employment and economic stability and stabilise the rate of growth, can be optimised and sustained. By this, the resource curse will be averted and productive capacity will increase, leading to sustainable growth and development in Africa, where conditions for growth and development remain inadequately met.

The originality of this paper can be viewed from the strength of its arguments and methods adopted to address the questions raised in this paper. This study further illuminated age-long obscure relations in the literature of natural resource endowment and economic growth by taking a disaggregated approach to the component-by-component analysis of natural resources factors (the oil rent, coal rent and forest rent) and their corresponding influence on economic growth in Africa. This pattern remains underexplored mainly in previous literature on the subject. Many African countries are blessed with an abundance of these different natural resources in varying proportions. The misuse and mismanagement of these resources along various dimensions have been the core of the inclination towards the resource curse hypothesis in Africa. Knowing how growth conditions respond to changes in the depth of forest resources, oil resources and coal resources could be useful pointers in Africa's overall energy use and management. This study contributed to the literature on natural resource-induced growth dynamics by offering a generalisable conclusion as to why natural resource-abundance economies are prone to poor economic performance. This study further asks if mineral deposits are a source or reflection of ill growth and underdevelopment in African countries.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the relationship between financial inclusion, banking stability and economic growth in sub-Saharan African countries given the interconnectedness between them. Globally, financial inclusion has gained recognition as a critical channel for promoting economic growth by bringing a large proportion of the unbanked population into the formal financial system. This cannot be achieved exclusive of the banking sector.

This paper focussed on 18 countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Data on financial inclusion and the economy were obtained from the World Bank, and bank soundness indicators data were also obtained from International Monetary Fund covering the 11-year period from 2008 through 2018. Panel system generalised method of moments is employed for the regression analysis because it has the capability to produce unbiased and consistent results even if there is endogeneity in the model.

The results show that economic growth drives banking stability and not vice versa; confirming a unidirectional causality from gross domestic product to banking stability. So, this study finds support for the demand-following hypothesis. The paper further observed that financial inclusion positively and significantly influences the stability of banks and economic growth. The study established that bank capital regulation negatively influences banking stability in sub-Saharan African countries.

This study does not capture the unique country-specific relationship.

The policy implication is that policymakers in sub-Saharan African countries should focus on growth-enhancing policies that improve the level of financial inclusion. The central banks in sub-Saharan African countries should take advantage of the positive effect of financial inclusion to develop regulatory frameworks and policies that make it attractive for banks to continue to expand their operations to the unbanked.

This is, as far as the authors know, the explanation of the interconnection of financial inclusion, banking stability and economic growth in sub-Saharan Africa.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between government and Balinese society in tax decentralization through budgeting seem to insignificantly improve the welfare of Balinese society.

This research was conducted in Bali Province involving eight regencies and one city. The data used in this study were secondary data, derived from relevant institutions or from websites through internet browsing and other documentations in the form of official reports/publications, such as regional budget, accountability reports, regional regulations and documents on budget and development of the regional economy. The present research used the partial least squares analysis technique.

Fiscal decentralization does not necessarily lead to better budget management. The success of fiscal decentralization can be found in the quality of the regional budget and the quality of budget management. The allocation of the regional budget for public service improvement and the development of infrastructure will increase the economic capacity of the regions. Improvement in regional economic capacity encourages the improvement of community welfare.

This income inequality points to the issue of fiscal capacity. The development of the financial role of district/city regions in the Province of Bali remains at a level gap with the development level of community welfare. During this period, the financial role of the government as estimated from the ratio of the national budget to the regional budget is higher than that of the society development. The acceleration role of the government is not proportional to the development of Human Development Index outcomes.

This paper reviews one of the crucial issues in the recent growth literature concerning the hypothesis of cross country convergence of levels and growth rates of income per capita implied by the neo‐classical growth model, both in the Solow‐Swan and Rampsey‐Cass‐Koopmans versions. The alternative endogenous growth models, consistent with permanent income inequality, are considered. Convergence to a common income level versus divergence is discussed from a theoretical point of view. Then, empirical tests of the convergence property are presented. What emerges is that Barro type regressions and their findings about “conditional” convergence are questionable and cannot be used to give a definitive response on this issue.